Suggested readings week 21/2023
RNA repear toolkit
Ribonucleic acids (RNAs) molecules are fundamental in the cells of all living organisms. The now famous Messenger RNAs (or mRNAs) translate genetic information into recipes for the creation of a protein.
In order to fulfill their diverse functions in the cell, RNAs often need to be chemically modified after their creation or repaired after damage
Andreas Marx, professor of organic and cellular chemistry at the University of Konstanz, published recently with his research group astonishing results about the ability of an organism to put in place repeair mechanisms for RNA.
https://phys.org/news/2023-04-hidden-rna-mechanism-humans.html
Appreciate and change
This is an old and widely accepted essay on software development, that somehow was part of a disruptive change in software engineering several years ago,
Now its author Kent Beck, software engineer, co-author of the Agile Manifesto and leading the revolution of Extreme Programming, repurposes the same essay in terms of an approach to solving problems in general.
The classical engineer’s approach to change: find a problem, solve it. An alternate approach when a lasting change is needed:
see the world appreciatively, by focusing first on things that are going well or have gone well in the past
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/appreciating-your-way-to-xp
Artificial Intelligence and EU: the vote
The list of observations and comments and the resulting vote for a new Artificial Intelligence Regulation at the EU level is a very interesting democracy in practice event, with profound effects on future research and deployment of such technologies.
Xerox PARC will never disappear
A gigantic archive of Xerox PARC file system is under publication now, and a lot of funny and very interesting things get discovered inside.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-backup-of-historical-proportions/
Not incidentally
Common environmental contaminant increased rate of neurodegenerative affliction in one population by 70%
https://www.science.org/content/article/widely-used-chemical-strongly-linked-parkinson-s-disease